Drama
Be in no doubt: this play is utterly depraved, but it is also brilliantly original and tender. What starts off as a gritty and character driven play becomes dark and disturbingly existential. The two main characters, Ian (Andy King) and Cate (Charlotte Covell), spend their time deriving power by manipulating each other to compensate for their own weaknesses. Ian, a home affairs journalist, is vulgarity personified; he smokes, drinks and he is highly prejudiced and emotionally exploitative of Cate, his lover.
Cate is tepid and nervous character, very Adele Corners in Kalifornia. Despite often collapsing in fits, she still has some control over Ian, mainly by withholding sex. Both actors get the lack of love and complexity of their relationship spot on. The pair obviously hate each other, but can't leave the situation. They have very little contact with the outside world, except receiving room service and phoning a story through to the newsroom.
The authenticity of the script and the brilliant characterisation makes the graphic sex scenes all the more shocking. The physical and emotional relationship between the couple is what makes this play so incredible; both vulnerable, both base, both unloved.
Halfway through, just as the couple are reaching equilibrium, a soldier (Devesh Patel) bursts in with a gun rifle to Ian's head. It is only when the soldier describes the wartime atrocities he has committed that the significance of the events in the hotel room becomes clear. He describes how he has raped an entire family and hacked people to death, but Ian refuses to put this in the news.
Themes of how the media manipulates and packages tragedy are subtly woven into the script, but might get lost for some among the depravity. The scene when Ian is raped by the soldier is unlike anything you will ever witness. Sarah Kane's use of massively disturbing scenes to symbolise dark themes is captured brilliantly by the director and cast. It might not be everyone's cup of tea but it offers something truly new in Oxford drama: natural, believable, and intellectual, whilst being entirely unpretentious. A fantastic production of a fantastic play.
Rarely has any play aroused such critical fury as Sarah Kane's Blasted. On its short-lived first run at the Royal Court Theatre in 1995, it was savaged by every newspaper in the country. The play was a "disgusting feast of filth", and "devoid of intellectual or artistic merit". It's easy to see why. Blasted features fellatio, rape, forced masturbation, and anal rape. More shockingly, a baby is eaten on stage.
Blasted is indeed a shocking play, but not for those reasons. We see in the structure of Blasted a playwright prepared to break all the rules. But when the play premiered the critics were unable to see past the surface of violence and sex. Fellow playwrights, however, came rushing to her defence. "The critics are out of their depth," wrote Harold Pinter. He argued that the hostile reception to Blasted was largely because the theatrical establishment didn't understand the new forms Kane was inventing.
Sarah Kane wanted to write a play about ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and she set it in a Leeds hotel room. Two worlds collide and shatter. Kane believed passionately that there was no fundamental difference between the Yugoslavian civil wars and the street violence in Britain. By juxtaposing two such conflicting scenes, we are forced to reassess our perceptions. "The press kept asking why it was necessary to show such acts of violence on stage," Kane wrote. "It was necessary because we normally see war atrocities as documentary or news footage ... so suddenly all those familiar images were presented in an odd theatrical form."
Since 1995, Kane has slowly become an iconic figure, symbolic of cutting-edge drama. Blasted was written when she was still a student in the early 1990s, and her suicide in 1999 cut short the life of a writer who would have been one of the most important playwrights working today.
You know that bit at the end of an Agatha Christie when the murderer, having been tracked down, spontaneously tells his own story, explaining exactly how and why he committed his crime? In a sense Neil LaBute's Bash isolates and presents three versions of that moment. However, while in your average murder mystery such revelations end the quest for answers, tie up all loose ends and elicit a satisfied sigh of completion from all involved, in Bash they unravel the very concept of motivation and provide a dark vision of "matter of fact brutality" as LaBute puts it, for which there is no real explanation. The stories resist any sense of catharsis and instead the audience is left with a chilling recognition of the frustration, anger and violence that underpin everyday life.
Bash consists of three narrative plays, two of them monologues, which rework the themes of classical myth in contemporary, American terms. The first is set in a hotel bedroom, featuring Ilan Goodman as a business man whose baby daughter has died. He haltingly reveals the true circumstances surrounding his daughter's death to an unseen companion. The second presents Gethin Anthony and Olivia Grant as a pair of college sickly sweethearts who come to New York for a party; they describe the night in tandem, their accounts veering apart horrifyingly as the night wears on. In the final monologue Polly Findlay plays a woman recounting how her affair with a teacher when she was at school has led to her current detainment in a police interrogation room. However, the emphasis of this play is never on punishment by law for the crimes, but instead focuses on the insidious horror which gnaws away inside each of the perpetrators.
The cast is accomplished and convincing, drawing the audience into the stories and expertly capturing the inner torment of each character. Polly Findlay is particularly impressive; she combines the tough, desperate storyteller with the innocent thirteen year old girl that the woman remembers being, in a natural and intimate performance. The stark set allows absolute focus on the actors, making even more vivid the devastating pictures they paint.
The word "bash" simultaneously contains the ideas of conviviality and violence, and perhaps also the suggestion of shame (abashment). In the same way LaBute's play juxtaposes innocence and brutality throughout, but they are not set up as opposing forces. The stories told by the characters fuse cruelty and self-delusion, leaving the audience shocked and discomforted. In the last monologue the audience is put in the position of the detective on the other side of the interrogation desk from the criminal, but unlike Poirot, we are left with many disturbing questions unanswered.
15th Jan 2004